Archive for the ‘Welsh language’ Category

The Search for a Christian Social Order:

Although the Nonconformist Churches in cities like Coventry played a major role in the growth of ‘Labour’ politics between the wars, Christian Socialist workshops were weak in organisation and unduly idealistic about the contribution of labour. However, Christian Socialist thinkers within the churches did good work both in securing a better legal framework within which workers’ organisations could develop, and fostered workers’ education.

Within the Church of England, the Christian Socialist ideas of F. D. Maurice had a tremendous influence on Anglican thought about the secular world in the twentieth century. This was partly due to the solid work of the Christian Social Union which had been founded in 1889 with Brooke Foss Westcott, the Cambridge New Testament scholar, later Bishop of Durham, as its first president.

In England this tradition came to its climax in the work of William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1942 to 1944. Temple had deep insights into the nature of Christian worship, and a commitment to evangelism; he constantly exercised ‘prophetic judgement’ on the social situation, keeping both this world and the next in equal focus.

In 1932, the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, in his first major work, Moral Man and Immoral Society, had reacted strongly against the liberalism, optimistic humanism and moral idealism of the social gospel movement. In doing so, he was echoing the views of the Swiss pastor and theologian Karl Barth. However, he also made use of Marxist ideas in arguing that due to the fundamental evil in both man and human society, Christian political action called not simply for love, but for an attempt to give each group within society enough power to defend itself against exploitation by other groups. Although relations between individuals might be seen as a matter of ethics, relations between groups were a matter of politics. Niebuhr himself took an active part in American politics, founding the Fellowship of Socialist Christians. In his later work, he criticised both the liberal and Marxist views of human nature equally in The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941-43). He stressed that the final answer to the human condition lay beyond history in the love of God as seen in the cross of Christ. At the same time, he emphasised that Christians must not opt out of the politics and power-struggles of the twentieth century. In Britain, William Temple gave this theology his own, practical cutting-edge:

If we have to choose between making men Christian and making the social order more Christian, we must choose the former. But there is no such antithesis… There is no hope of establishing a more Christian social order except through the labour and sacrifice of those in whom the Spirit of Christ is active, and the first necessity for progress is more and better Christians taking full responsibility as citizens for the political, social and economic system under which they and their fellows live.

Roman Catholic doctrine in the 1930s and 1940s was intrinsically and explicitly opposed to socialism, though this opinion was moderated in an encyclical issued by Pope Pius XI on 15 May 1931 Quadragesimo anno. In this, Pius described the major dangers for human freedom and dignity arising from unrestrained capitalism and totalitarian communism. Pius XI called upon true socialism to distance itself from totalitarian communism as a matter of clarity and also as a matter of principle. Communists were accused of attempting to overthrow all existing civil society, and Christian socialism, if allied to Communism, was deemed to be a contradiction in terms because of this. This attitude hardened during the Cold War, when both Poland and Hungary rebelled against Soviet control, with the support of their primates. In 1957, Pius XI famously wrote at that “no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist”, yet had clarified that a Catholic was free to vote for the British Labour Party, which was still, at that time, the UK affiliate of the Socialist International. Under Pope John Paul, the official Catholic attitude hardened once more in the 1980s with the Labour Party coming under attack for its failure to come out strongly enough in support of Solidarity, the Polish free trade union movement. More recently, left-wing ideological movements such as liberation theology in South America, from the 1970s, have argued for the compatibility of socialism and Catholicism. Influenced by this as a native of Argentina, Pope Francis has shown sympathy to socialist causes with claims such as that capitalism is “Terrorism against all of Humanity” and that “it is the communists who think like Christians. Christ spoke of a society where the poor, the weak and the marginalized have the right to decide.” In 2016 the Tradinista! social media group was formed of young Catholics devoted to a synthesis of Marxist and traditional Catholic critiques of political and economic liberalism, and to the promotion of a socialism that would be compatible with Catholic social teaching.

When I went to Bangor University in the mid-1970s, a second generation of Welsh Nationalist leaders had come to the fore, moving away from the pro-fascist politics of Saunders Lewis, its Catholic founder. These included R. Tudur Jones, Principal of the Bala Bangor Theological College, under whom I had the privilege of studying in my first year. His political stance, combined with the Calvinist doctrine of a corpus Christianum, and his deeply-held Christian pacifism, created an integrated vision that was significant to the religious and political life of Christian Wales in the later half of the 20th century. Jones argued that the “state should be a servant, to preserve order and to allow men to live the good life”.

Today, many Calvinistic Methodists, Baptists and Independents have come to accept same-sex marriage on the grounds that it delivers marriage equality in the eyes of the state while still allowing their congregations to follow their own conscience, thus upholding the traditional Biblical teaching on marriage through the separation of church and state. The Calvinist tradition in the Nonconformist churches in Wales and England has also influenced the Labour Party’s commitment to disarmament and nonviolence since the 1930s. I was a founding member of Cymdeithas y Cymod, the Welsh associate of the Fellowship of Reconciliation in 1974. In Wales, the Christian Pacifist tradition remained strong, influencing the student-led direct action campaigns of the 1970s, which sought to defend and uphold the position of the Welsh Language in society. Throughout Britain, Christian CND grew rapidly in the 1980s, and in 1982 the whole of Wales was declared a Nuclear Free Zone when all its local authorities refused to participate in the government’s ‘protect and survive’ scheme. This was an important turning point in the refusal of Christians to countenance a world destroyed by nuclear war and took place at a time of mass rallies and, of course, the Greenham Common protest, in which English Quaker women played a leading role. Church leaders like Bruce Kent were prominent in CND, as well as in the Anti-Apartheid Movement and soildarity campaigns with liberation movements in Latin America.

The Christian Socialist Movement was an amalgamation of the Society of Socialist Clergy and Ministers and the Socialist Christian League. R. H. Tawney made one of his last public appearances at the Movement’s inaugural meeting on 22 January 1960 (an annual memorial lecture is held in his honour). The Methodist minister and Peace Pledge Union leader, Donald Soper chaired the Movement until becoming its President in 1975. In August 2013 it announced that following a consultation with its members it would be changing its name to Christians on the Left.

I was one of those who opposed the change in name for two reasons. Firstly, because I felt that the new name was purely descriptive of a vague and continually shifting perspective on a purely secular spectrum as contrasted with a continuous spiritual tradition dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. Secondly, it seems to lack the sense of action and interaction contained in the word ‘movement’. This seems to be underlined by the very recent success of ‘Momentum’ within the Labour Party. Its founders, perhaps wisely, did not describe themselves by their ‘ultra-left’ polar position, but by their bid for ‘power’ within the party. Christians are naturally reticent to talk about bidding for power for fear of being associated with ‘a love of power’. In 1974, Philip Potter, the then General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, gave the Alex Wood Memorial Lecture in London, entitling his talk, The Love of Power, or the Power of Love? In it, he referred to random examples from around the world to illustrate what he called ‘the tragic separation which grips the ‘oikoumene’, the whole inhabited earth.’ These included Ethiopia, Southern Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. To these he added ‘the tragic irony of Eastern Europe where a revolutionary effort at overcoming these separations has led to new forms of separation and oppression… the experience of the Socialist states has encouraged people to throw up their hands in despair and opt out of the struggle for change, because of the lack of a human face to socialism, as officially practised in those countries’.

Fifteen years later, that ‘practice’ was brought to an end, and one form of separation in Europe was brought to an end, and with it those in Southern Africa. Living in Hungary for twelve out of the last twenty-eight years, I have become increasingly wary of describing myself as any kind of socialist. By doing so, I now believe that we have allowed new divisions to take their place in twenty-first century European societies, leading to the decline of social democracy and the rise of populism and nationalism.

In Britain, we have abandoned the task of developing a form of human socialism, solidly rooted in the forms of Christian socialism of modern Britain, but with a broad appeal to those of all faiths and none. In the Labour Party, in particular, we are still set on repeating the ideological divisions of the past, especially of denigrating the importance of the ordinary individual in favour of the personality cult of ‘the leader’ of the mass movement. As Christians in politics in general, we are still beset by tribalism. As a result, Potter’s conclusion is as fresh and challenging for me now as when I first read it in the FoR pamphlet:

It is this newness, this overcoming of separation, which is the summons to love with overwhelming power. And this love is a political act, it is the life of the ‘polis’, the city, which consists in listening, giving and forgiving… Its gates are never shut, and all the wealth and splendour of the nations in all their variety are brought into it. No more is the ‘oikoumene’ divided by closed walls. The very leaves of the trees are for the healing of broken humanity. Significantly, only two kinds of people are excluded from that city… those who either, in self-protecting cowardice, avoid involving themselves in the struggle against separation and disunity; or those who ruthlessly distort, exploit and destroy, exploit and destroy human beings, thus strengthening the walls of separation. A clear alternative is placed before us – the rejection of the love of power which produces and maintains separation, leading to death; or the power of love, which travails for the breaking down of separation and for the reunion of the ‘oikoumene’… that we may all share the endless life of the open city. The power of love is hope in action – action founded on the divine promise: ‘Behold I am making all things new’.

Part Two:

Men of Harlech and the Rise of a New Wales?:

By the Spring of 1404, Owain Glyn Dwr had all but gained control of the whole of Wales. The one castle which eluded capture was Harlech. Both strategically and spiritually it was the most important, the key to the gateway in and out of Snowdonia. Once Harlech was theirs, the rebels could truly claim to be in control of the whole of Wales. Harlech was protected on two sides by the sea and by two-metre thick concentric curtain walls, with a barbican gatehouse, almost impossible to take by storm. Owain’s French allies came to his aid with an army of 2,500 men and artillery, especially trebuchets. With these, he laid siege to the castle, while the French stopped any supplies reaching the defenders by sea. After three months of constant bombardment, and with only twenty survivors left inside, Harlech is thought to have fallen on St George’s Day, 23 April 1404. In the Great Hall, Glyn Dwr declared Welsh independence, called his first Welsh Parliament to meet at Machynlleth, and began to establish a fully independent Welsh Church. He even began to plan a full-scale invasion of England, together with Mortimer and Northumberland.

With the capture of Harlech, and certainly by the end of 1404, Glyn Dwr had effectively driven the English out of the whole of Wales. With the military campaigns at an end, he maintained popular momentum by putting an end to feudal payments to the lords and the crown; they could raise enough money from the parliaments they called, attended by delegates from all over Wales – the first and (so far) last Welsh parliaments in Welsh history with the power to raise taxes. From the gentry came Owain’s best leaders like Rhys Gethin and the Tudor brothers, from the clergy came intellectuals who charged his principality with principle. From the ordinary people by the thousand came a loyalty which had enabled him to lead a divided people one-twelfth the size of the English against a dozen royal armies. It was at once an undeniable fact, which became both a myth and a legend, as Gwyn Williams remarked, that..

Owain Glyn Dwr was one Welsh prince who was never betrayed by his own people, not even in the darkest days when many of them could have saved their skins by doing so. There is no parallel in the history of the Welsh.

Glyn Dwr now had a base at Harlech, and a staff of civil servants and diplomats, with contacts in Rome, Avignon, Burgos and Paris. In 1404 he concluded an alliance with France. There was a takeover by professional ‘courtiers’ such that his correspondence became weighty and official. Having summoned his parliament to Machynlleth, in the heart of liberated country, in the shape of four men from every commote in Wales, he required of them to raise money, ratify an alliance with France, the key to survival, and to witness his formal coronation in the presence of envoys from France, Scotland and Castile. He was now Owain, by the grace of God, Prince of Wales, with a great seal and a privy seal, showing a figure with a slightly forked beard, seated and crowned with orb and sceptre. His envoys to France were Gruffudd Young and John Hanmer. A French fleet of sixty ships sailed, but dispersed their efforts along the southern coasts of England.

The following February, Glyn Dwr drew up a tripartite agreement with Sir Edmund Mortimer and the earl of Northumberland, whereby England and Wales were to be divided between the three leaders. Interestingly, Sir Edmund had by this time abandoned the fiction that he was acting on behalf of his nephew, and claimed the English crown for himself. In addition, Mortimer would control the south of England, Percy the north and Glyn Dwr a Wales which would run from the Mersey to the Severn, taking in great tracts of the West Midlands, with a frontier deliberately drawn to include the Six Ashes on the Bridgnorth Road where Merlin had prophesied the Great Eagle would rally the Welsh warriors for the day of deliverance. A second parliament was summoned, this time to Harlech, and this funded an army of ten thousand men to support a rising in the north of England and a small French army of about two thousand men which landed at Milford Haven, forced the (English)men of south Pembrokeshire to buy their peace and marched with the Welsh in a triumphal progress across south Wales to pause at Worcester.

Meanwhile, in England, the close involvement of Sir Edmund in these treasonable conspiracies to invade had repercussions for his nephew, who, with his brother, was still in royal custody. The situation became grave in February 1405, when Lady Despencer, the mistress of Edmund of Langley, the boys’ other uncle, arranged for their abduction from Windsor. It was intended that the boys be taken to Lady Despencer’s estates in south Wales, possibly to become figureheads for the invasion, but they were recaptured at Cheltenham and placed under closer guard.

By this time, the tide was also beginning to turn against Henry’s enemies in both Scotland and France. The allies could get no further and withdrew, with many of the French returning home. Yet in 1406 came the glittering climax for the new Welsh nation and its prince. In return for their support, the French had required the Welsh to transfer their allegiance to the Pope at Avignon. In response, the Welsh required Avignon to recognise the newly created independent Welsh Church. At a great Synod near Machynlleth that Church adopted a sweeping policy designed not just to restore to the new Wales its own form of Catholicism, independent of Rome, but also to re-establish it its own bureaucracy and intelligentsia. The Welsh Church was to be free of Canterbury, with its own metropolitan Archbishopric at St. David’s exercising control over the western English diocese of the Tripartite Indenture as well. Welsh clerics were to be Welsh-speaking, Welsh Church revenues were to be devoted to Welsh needs and two universities were to be created, one in the north and another in the south, to train Welshmen in the service of the new Wales.

But, in the cold light of where real power lay, all this was illusion. The ground beneath the insurrection had already begun to give way. During 1406 Gower, parts of the Tywi valley and Ceredigion crumbled, while Anglesey made its own peace with the king. The Mortimer boys also remained tightly under the control of the English king. In 1406 they were placed in the custody of Richard, Lord Grey of Codnor, and in 1409 made wards of the ‘rightful’ Prince of Wales, Hal, later Henry V. In the same year, Roger, the younger of the two boys died, and Sir Edmund was killed at Harlech, when the castle was retaken for the crown as one of the last outposts of Welsh resistance.

By 1406, the armies of Henry IV had also begun to gain the upper hand in the war in the March. It was the Monmouth-born Prince Hal who had finally begun to recover the marcher lands lost to the Welsh. As Bolingbroke, his father had held extensive lands in the March, acquiring Brecon and Hay by marriage to Mary de Bohun, heiress to the earl of Hereford, and Monmouth, Kidwelly and Iscennen in south Wales which he had inherited from his father. These holdings were what enabled him to strike at the heart of Richard II’s power and popularity in Wales and the March. As a fifteen-year-old, Prince Hal had been injured in the face fighting the Welsh in 1403, and returned with a vengeance in 1405, at first storming through Wales, re-taking towns and villages, but then slowly and deliberately taking back the castles one at a time, re-garrisoning them before moving on to the next objective. He won his first major victory at Usk, where he captured three hundred of Glyn Dwr’s men, slaughtering them all. He also imprisoned Owain’s son Gruffudd, sending him to the Tower of London, where he was tortured mercilessly. Welsh nobles and gentry were publicly executed and parts of their bodies were displayed across Wales as a deterrence. During 1407, the Welsh maintained their position but were now fighting against the odds as resistance in Scotland slackened and France slithered into internal conflict. The royal armies carted great guns from Yorkshire through Bristol in order to mount the final sieges, though Aberystwyth under Rhys the Black beat off a fierce attack. Henry, now strongly Roman Catholic and seeking European help against the Welsh, was able to expel Glyn Dwr’s appointments from St Asaph’s and St David’s.

In 1408 Aberystwyth finally fell, and only Harlech Castle still stood against the English, who had reconquered the rest of the country. In July, a thousand of Hal’s men arrived at its walls, ready to lay siege to it. Cannons were used, almost for the first time, but however hard they pounded, the inner walls never collapsed. In February 1409, it was still going strong, disease and starvation having killed off most of the men inside. When they finally gave up the castle due to starvation, Owain was nowhere to be found. Legend has it that he had slipped out of the castle at night before the siege ended, though his family were captured and sent to the Tower. The last of his northern allies had again been cut down. The Welsh nation, established and visible for four years, vanished back into the woods. Glyn Dwr himself headed for the hills, once more an outlaw. Together with his other son Maredudd and a handful of his best captains, and a handful of Scots and French, Owain was at large throughout 1409, devastating wherever he went; at the end of the year the officers of the north-eastern March were ordered to stop making truces with him. His last big raid came in 1410, when his raiding party swooped into Shropshire, which in 1402 had made its own peace with ‘the land of Wales’. They were beaten back, and Rhys the Black, Philip Scudamore and Rhys Tudor were executed. After that, wrote a chronicler, Glyn Dwr made no great attack. The last direct reference to him was made in 1412, when he led a successful ambush of an English force at Brecon, taking their leader, Davey Gam, captive. Gruffudd Young carried on the fight, and the campaign for the Welsh Church, a little longer, but the Welsh war of independence was effectively over.

No one knows what happened to Glyn Dwr. He simply vanished once more. One suggestion is that he spent his last days in Herefordshire’s ‘Golden Valley’ (Cwm Dwr in Welsh, mistaken for d’or in French), sheltered by his son-in-law John Scudamore. Henry V, the new Welsh-born English king, who had taken Owain’s remaining son into his service, twice offered the rebel leader a pardon, but the old man was too proud to accept. After the death of Sir Edmund in the English siege of Harlech in 1409, Lady Mortimer and her daughters were taken to London and were apparently all dead by 1413. Although there is no evidence to suggest that there was any compliance by the young earl in the treason conducted by his uncle in his name, his position remained difficult, as his claim to the throne of England was strong. There was a real threat of conspiracy to place him on the throne after the death of Henry IV in 1413. The young Henry V therefore showed great magnanimity, and not a little political skill, when in June 1413 he released Edmund from captivity and returned his estates to him. The king was rewarded for this when another conspiracy to place Edmund on the throne was revealed to the king by his former charge. When Henry V embarked for Normandy in August 1415 he was accompanied by Edmund Mortimer, whose retinue included 160 mounted archers. He was active in the siege of Harfleur, but contracted dysentery and was forced to return home, leaving his troops take part in the epic ‘English’ victory of 25 October. In 1417 Henry V mounted a second expedition with the serious intention of conquering Normandy. Edmund again took part with a force of a hundred lancers and three hundred archers. The success of his troops led to Edmund’s appointment as the king’s lieutenant in Normandy.

In the traumatic fifteen years of 1398 to 1413, Wales had been propelled not only into a war of national liberation within itself but into a civil war stretching into England as well. Gwyn Williams assessed its significance in the following terms:

The whole complex of contradictory and often unpleasant attitudes which had characterised Welsh political life since the tenth century assumed permanent and painful form in the minds of most Welsh people. Half-suppressed, for in modern Wales and particularly among people of substance, Owain is still something of an outlaw prince, it has helped to make the Welsh the peculiarly schizophrenic people we are.

Since 1410 most Welsh people most of the time have abandoned any idea of independence as unthinkable. But since 1410 most Welsh people, at some time or other, if only in some secret corner of the mind, have been ‘out with Owain and his barefoot scrubs’. For the Welsh mind is still haunted by its lightning-flash vision of a people that was free.

If we are to view Owain Glyn Dwr as an unsung hero of Welsh history, we must also admit that, ultimately, he was a heroic failure. In this context, we need to ask why and how, forgotten until the late eighteenth century, he could be hailed first as a romantic hero and then in the nineteenth century as a founding father of Welsh nationalism. As Dai Smith has pointed out,

He justified his revolt against the English Crown by reference to rights enjoyed in the past when the Welsh were the original British. He called on ancient genealogies to prove his claim to be Prince of Wales. The fifteen-year struggle did have an anti-English tap-root in a time of severe dislocation, but the revolt was sparked by a personal grievance, fed on the uncertainties of English civil strife, and was never a popular uprising.

Glyn Dwr led a group of patricians with a similar list of grievances which they were intent on settling. He may have had a consciousness of all of Wales in the way that fifteenth-century Europe was beginning to nurture nation-states, and this concept was supported by the clerks and gentlemen who added him in his plans for a Welsh ‘parliament’ at Machynlleth and a Welsh ‘university’ to service the rule. He was, though, not averse to including chunks of English territory and English-speakers in his Wales, and his revolt was more a regional conflagration than a national war for ‘independence’.

On the whole, Dai Smith’s assessment of the significance of the Glyn Dwr rebellion seems to be more convincing to me, in that it assesses the narrative of events against the backcloth of the dynastic struggles of the English kings and the Marcher lords. There is certainly room in this narrative for both the contemporary myths and the lasting legends surrounding the enigmatic leader of the rebellion, which turned into both a civil war and a national war of independence, but that is not the same as mythologising him as a founder or a forerunner of modern Welsh nationalism.

Part One: The Men and the Myths, 1398-1403

The Welsh Dynasties:

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, much of Wales was ruled by a succession of resolute Princes of Gwynedd, from the area around Snowdonia which the Anglo-Norman marcher lords had failed to penetrate. The princes strove to bring the whole of Wales under their banner, but they could only achieve this if the messy parochialism of separate territories could be sorted out by instilling in their rulers and sub-rulers the order of hierarchical allegiance demanded by the Anglo-Norman kings of the Welsh princes themselves. The Gwynedd dynasty was willing to pay this price so that, within Wales, they could exert the same feudal pyramid by referring to themselves as Princes of Wales. Through a clever combination of diplomacy and war they came close to achieving this, though not without upsetting other Welsh rulers and causing internecine strife. Wales might have emerged as a semi-feudal kingdom in a feudal Europe had it not been for the growing unease about an English kingdom which was undergoing the same process, combined with the deep mistrust felt by other Welsh princes and lords for the ‘modernising’ tendencies of the Gwynedd dynasty. When Llywelyn the Last was killed in 1282 at Cilmeri, near Builth Wells, far from his northern base, military initiatives designed to unify Wales disappeared for more than a century.

One major source of alarm in the century following Edward I’s establishment of an ‘iron ring’ of fortresses around Snowdonia was those Welshmen who took service with the enemies of the English kings. Outstanding among these was Owain ap Thomas ap Rhodri, a descendent of the Gwynedd dynasty, who from 1369 led a Welsh free company of mercenaries in the service of France. Owain Lawgoch, of the Bloody Hand, based his claim on direct dynastic inheritance of the Llywelyns and announced the imminence of his arrival with a French fleet. He sailed from Harfleur on two occasions, and throughout the 1370s there were ripples of support for his name throughout north Wales. The English authorities took these threats seriously and sent one John Lambe to murder him in Mortagne-sur-Mer in 1378, paying him twenty pounds to do the deed. There were repeated security clampdowns in Wales itself, with a coastal watch, the manning of walls and the renewed exclusion of all Welshmen from any office of significance from 1385-6. In the Welsh poetry of the period there is a note of discord and dissatisfaction at the treatment of the Welsh gentry in their own country. Gruffydd Llwyd, for example, wrote a poem bemoaning the lack of honour accorded to Welshmen of merit of the old tradition. Few Welshmen were knighted and even his own patron, Owain Glyn Dwr, who to him seemed so worthy of such reward, had been slighted.

Where the idea of ‘the Return of Arthur’ could find an anchorage in political reality was the March, the borderland, among the Norman baronage which had long Welsh heritage. The Mortimer family could lay claim to such connections, since one of their number had married Gwladus, daughter of Llywelyn ab Iorwerth, in the previous century, and in the second half of the fourteenth century Roger Mortimer, fourth Earl of March, had probably as good a dynastic claim as any to the Principality of Gwynedd. He became the focus of extravagant hopes among the Welsh gentry.The poet Iolo Goch, one of his tenants, wrote an ode of loyalty in which he addressed Mortimer as the inheritor of the Arthurian mantle. Here was the Hero Returned who would rescue the Welsh from their degradation. What made this all the more poignant was that Mortimer also had a good claim to the inheritance of Richard II. With the accession of Richard II, some of the Welsh officials, at least in north Wales, returned to favour. Prominent among his supporters were the five sons of Tudur ap Gronw who, from their base in Anglesey commanded an influential set of familial connections in north Wales. Gwilym and Rhys Tudor in particular were favoured by Richard, who was as popular in north Wales as he was in Cheshire. It was at this time that the renaissance of the Welsh language was beginning to meet with judicial resistance. The language was resurgent in the Vale of Glamorgan and the Welsh became town-dwellers, in Oswestry, Brecon, and Monmouth, among others. A chorus of complaint against them burst out not only from these towns, but from merchants on the English side of the March. Nearly every Parliament between 1378 and 1400 demanded action against the impertinent Welsh peasants, and there was even an anti-Welsh riot at the University of Oxford in which the cry went up to ‘kill the Welsh dogs!’

With this reaction, by the end of the fourteenth century, the administration of Wales was returned solidly under the control of the English crown. Wales had been experiencing growing tensions during the last quarter of the fourteenth century. At a time of falling agricultural revenues, the great landlords had become increasingly rapacious, exacting heavy fines and subsidies from their tenants. Despite the popularity of Mortimer and Richard II with the Welsh, the English king, at least, did not reciprocate in his appointments. Between 1372 and 1400, of the sixteen bishops appointed in Wales, only one was Welsh.The Welsh clergy had become increasingly outraged at the exploitation of ecclesiastical revenues by English bishops who had been appointed to the Welsh sees. Racial tensions were also growing among the burgesses of ‘English’ boroughs and their Welsh neighbours, as can be seen in the granting of charters such as that received by the Mortimer borough of St Clears in 1393, guaranteeing that cases involving burgesses should only be heard by English burgesses and true Englishmen (to the west of St Clears, along the southern coast to Pembroke, Englishmen had settled in large numbers since the Norman Conquest of Wales).There was also a significant power vacuum at the head of Welsh society. In 1398, somewhat inexplicably, Richard II exiled the dukes of Norfolk and Hereford, who had engaged in a bitter personal dispute. The banishing of Hereford, better known as Henry Bolingbroke, was an action which ultimately sealed the king’s doom. The crackdown on the over-mighty magnates, coupled with the death of Roger Mortimer (VI), meant that most of the marcher lords had been removed. Richard II’s favourites who had been appointed to the vacant lands were incapable of exercising similar authority to that of the old marcher lords, a factor which was made worse by the division of Mortimer lands by the Crown following Bolingbroke’s coup of 1399.

The Mortimers had ruled the borderlands, the Marcher Lordships, virtually unopposed, and that was enough for the English to stomach. But Bolingbroke’s usurpation of Richard II, by which he became King Henry IV opened an era of instability in the succession in England, interwoven with the repeatedly renewed French wars, which thrust real power into the hands of the aristocracy, not least those in the March, where there were disturbances as factions moved against each other. When Henry IV made his son Prince of Wales, a French knight commented, but I think he must conquer Wales if he will have it…

Resentment soon led to outright rebellion. As heavy communal levies were imposed, Lord Grey of Ruthin reported serious misgovernance and riot beginning in the north-eastern March, and demanded action throughout Wales, particularly against Welsh officials who were kinsmen of the troublemakers. By the spring and summer of 1400, the administration at Caernarfon was nervous. It claimed evidence of letters passing between the Welsh and the Scots which called for rebellion: men in Merioneth were stealing arms and horses; ‘reckless men’ of many areas were meeting to plot sedition. In Anglesey, certainly, the Tudors were planning a protest in their island to tap the widespread dismay of their cohort of cousins.

Who was Owain Glyn Dwr?

On his father’s side, Glyn Dwr was a member of the dynasty of northern Powys and, on his mother’s side, a descendent of the princes of Deheubarth in the south-west. The family had fought for Llewelyn ap Gruffydd in the last war of independence and regained its lands in north-east Wales through a calculated alliance with the Marcher lords of Chirk, Bromfield and Yale. In 1328 it abandoned Welsh law and secured its estate with the English feudal hierarchy. They were therefore rooted in the official Welsh aristocracy. Glyn Dwr’s grandmother was a member of the lesser aristocrat family of Lestrange.

Glyn Dwr himself held the lordships of Glyn Dyfrdwy and Cynllaith Owain near the Dee directly of the king by Welsh barony. He had an income of two hundred pounds a year and a fine, moated mansion at Sycharth with tiled and chimneyed roofs, a deerpark, heronry, fishpond and mill. He was a complete Marcher gentleman and had put in his term (possibly seven years) at the Inns of Court. He must have been knowledgeable in law and married the daughter of Sir David Hanmer, a distinguished lawyer from a cymricised Flintshire family, who had served under Edward III and Richard II. In 1386 Glyn Dwr appeared at the same court of chivalry, together with a throng of baronial youth. He had served in the French wars in the retinues of Henry of Lancaster and the Earl of Arundel. In the Scottish campaign of 1385, according to the poet, he had worn his scarlet flamingo feather and driven the enemy before him like goats, with a broken lance.

In the troubles of 1399-1400, however, Glyn Dwr ran up against a powerful neighbour in Reginald de Grey, lord of Ruthin, an intimate of the new king, Henry IV. They quarreled over common land which de Grey had stolen. Glyn Dwr lost his dispute, and could not get justice from either king or parliament; Welshmen were seen as suspect, due to their support of Richard II – What care we for these barefoot rascals? A proud man, over forty and grey-haired in service, Glyn Dwr was subjected to malicious insults and the conflict turned violent. His response was a traditional one for a Marcher lord – he would avenge his honour with his sword. But he was more than a Marcher.

He was one of the living representatives of the old royal houses of Wales, Powys, an heir to Cadwaladr the Blessed, in a Wales strewn with the rubble of such dynasties. The bards had already reminded him of this heritage, which, in any case, he was himself steeped in. His correspondence suggests that an effort was made to contact the disaffected elsewhere, and when he raised his standard outside Ruthin on 16 September 1400, his followers at once proclaimed him Prince of Wales at his manor of Glyn Dyfrdwy. This was the signal for spontaneous outbreaks in north Wales, which within a matter of weeks had devastated town like Oswestry and engulfed the whole region of north-east Wales. The response to this call was extraordinary and may have startled even Glyn Dwr himself. Supported by the Hanmers and other Norman-Welsh Marchers, together with the Dean of St Asaph, he attacked Ruthin with several hundred men and went on to ravage every town in north-east Wales: Denbigh, Rhuddlan, Flint, Hawarden, Holt, and Welshpool. Rhys and Gwilym Tudor raised a rebellion in Anglesey. Hundreds of people rushed to join and churches followed towns into flame. The lesser clergy in north Wales joined promptly, as did the Cistercians throughout Wales. In Conwy, Strata Florida, Whitland, Llantarnam they rallied to the cause. In the latter of these, the Abbot, John ap Hywel, joined Glyn Dwr’s army as its chaplain and went on to fall in battle. The Franciscans also joined the cause; the friars at Llanfaes were ejected by Henry IV’s forces and their house was ravaged. There was an immediate response from Oxford, too, where Welsh scholars at once dropped their books and picked up arms, flocking home. They entered into ‘treasonous correspondence’ and met to plot the destruction of the kingdom and the English language. There were rumours that Welsh labourers in England were downing tools and heading for home. The English Parliament at once rushed to place anti-Welsh legislation on the books. As Edward I had done more than a century before, they singled out the bards of Wales in particular.

The English ‘marchers’ were utterly unable to cope with the rebellion. The sheer scale and ferocity of the Welsh attacks overwhelmed both the Principality and the March. Henry IV marched a big army in a great arc right across north Wales, burning and looting without mercy. He left the pacification to Henry Hotspur who offered general pardons , except to the ringleaders, in order to soften the heavy communal fines which were to follow. Whole populations scrambled to make peace. Over the winter of 1400-01, Glyn Dwr took to the hills with just seven men. In the Spring, however, the Tudors snatched control of Conwy Castle by a clever trick. The capture of the castle on Good Friday 1401, while the garrison was at prayers, was an act of great bravado which captured the imaginations of many disaffected Welshmen. It was a major propaganda coup, humiliating the English and inspiring the Welsh. Owain’s little band moved quickly into the centre and the south of Wales and once more hundreds ran to join the rebel army at Mynydd Hyddgen in the Pumlumon range, where they won a decisive victory. Carmarthenshire also erupted into revolt and so many rushed to arms that the government panicked that there might be an invasion of England. Another royal army was sent to trudge in futility through south Wales, the Welsh guerilla forces melting into the countryside before it, attacking its baggage trains as it retreated. Meanwhile, a powerful onslaught on Caernarfon drove the King’s Council to consider peace terms.

The key men were coming over to Glyn Dwr’s side, the gentry. There also seems to have been a network of supporters even in the towns. Glyn Dwr’s letters went to men such as Henry Dwnn of Kidwelly, who had served under John of Gaunt in France in 1371-2 and Richard II in Ireland in 1393-4. Dwnn had already had his estates confiscated once, in 1389. His retinue of two hundred men were said to terrorise the district. Many more local magnates like him joined Glyn Dwr’s cause. It was during 1401 that Owain became fully aware of his growing power to attract such support from local populations across Wales. He also addressed letters to the Irish, in Latin, and to the Scots, in French, reminding them of the prophecy that Wales would not be freed without their assistance and urged them to send support. In his letters to south Wales he declared himself as the divinely-appointed liberator who would deliver the Welsh from their oppressors. By the end of 1401 the revolt had spread across western and central Wales, though the English government still controlled large areas in the marches, and the southern lordships were as yet untouched.

Legendary Battles and Sieges:

In June 1401, Glyn Dwr had defeated an English Army at the Battle of Hyddgen near Brecon, and the next June (1402), he personally led a force into mid Wales. To combat this, Sir Edmund Mortimer, uncle of the ten-year old earl, also Edmund, assembled an army of Herefordshire men at Ludlow, later joined by a contingent from Maelienydd. The Mortimer forces met Glyn Dwr in open battle on 22 June 1402 at Bryn Glas near Pilleth, Hay-on-Wye. Many English knights were eager to engage the Welsh forces in open battle for the first time. Although Owain’s men had waged successful guerilla campaigns, they had only once faced the English in open conflict, at Hyddgen. The odds were stacked against them and the English were expecting to slaughter the upstarts. There were about 2,500 English troops and less than a thousand Welshmen. The Welsh wore light armour but were armed with a variety of deadly hand-to-hand combat weapons adapted from farmyard tools. The English knights had polished armour-plate, battle-axes and swords. The Welsh archers, however, had the strategic advantage of the high ground at the top of a steep hill, while the English position down in the valley was hampered by marshland, through which they had had to march in order to take it up. When they saw the Welsh archers taking up their position on the brow of the hill, the English knights decided to charge up it to do battle. They were supposed to be given cover by the long bowmen whom they had recruited from Maelienydd. At a crucial moment in the battle, this contingent lowered their bows, turned around, and fired upon the English infantry below them. Under attack from all sides and immobile in their heavy armour, they provided easy prey for the Welsh peasant foot soldiers, especially once they were down off their horses. By the end of the battle, the English had suffered a heavy defeat, losing more than a thousand men compared with Owain’s losses of just two hundred. It was a total and terrifying slaughter after which the land was said to be a sea of mud and blood. Perhaps the most important result, however, was that Sir Edmund Mortimer was captured and taken to Snowdonia by Glyn Dwr.

Following the disaster at Bryn Glas, the Percies and other relations of the Mortimers began to raise money for the ransom of Sir Edmund, but the king, already suspecting collusion between Mortimer and Glyn Dwr, forbade the payment of the ransom, and instead ordered the confiscation of Sir Edmund’s plate and jewels. Partly as a result of this, Edmund decided to make common cause with his captor, marrying Owain’s daughter, Catherine, at the end of November, then ordering his people to rally to Glyn Dwr. This may have been a ploy to obtain a quicker release, or might have been motivated by the deeper dynastic values and issues already referred to. The marriage echoed that of Ralph (II) Mortimer to Gwladus Ddu, the daughter of Llywelyn ab Iorwerth in 1228, and was popular with the Mortimer ‘clan’, which had always been attracted by Cymric lore in relation to the early British kings. The family genealogy and chronicle is preceded by a ‘Brut’, a chronicle of the ancient kings of Britain, drawn up some time after 1376 when John of Gaunt was attempting to secure the royal succession for his heirs. This was used as a means of harnessing legendary ancestry to the rival Mortimer claims. It is also significant that two of the three ‘Round Tables’, tournaments and entertainments with an Arthurian theme, were hosted by the Mortimers. The first, a great four-day event, took place at Kenilworth in 1279 and celebrated the knighting of the three sons of Roger (III) Mortimer.

Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, the death in 1398 of Roger (VI) Mortimer, who enjoyed a considerable degree of support in Shropshire and north Wales, meant that his six-year-old son Edmund was not only heir to the whole Mortimer empire in England and Wales, but was also regarded as heir to the throne. Bolingbroke’s coup of 1399 had dramatically changed this situation. Henry IV’s first Parliament recognised Bolingbroke’s son Henry as heir apparent, and the young Edmund, as a royal ward, was kept under close scrutiny, though treated with respect. Although the Mortimer estates were initially split up, in February 1400 they were taken into the hands of the steward and treasurer of the Great Council in order that their revenues could be used to defray the expenses of the royal household. Edmund and his brother Roger were allowed three hundred marks per year for their maintenance. So, when Sir Edmund, his uncle, decided to switch sides in the war of independence, the young earl’s position became an uncomfortable one, at least in political terms.

By December 1402 Sir Edmund had returned to Maelienydd proclaiming that he had joined Owain to restore Richard II, if alive, or otherwise to place his ‘honoured nephew’, Edmund earl of March, on the throne. In the event of the success of this scheme, Owain’s claims to Wales would be respected. The men of Maelienydd were again called up to join the campaign, and they were soon joined by the earl of Northumberland and his son, Henry (‘Harry’) Hotspur, who had recently had their own rather complex quarrel with the king. Despite the death of Hotspur and a number of leading rebel nobles at the bloody engagement at Shrewsbury on 21 July 1403, Glyn Dwr continued to make headway in south Wales. His forces stormed the towns and liberated Abergavenny, Usk, Caerleon, Newport and Cardiff. In 1402-3 the whole of Wales was at war, and the English were attacked wherever they went. But to gain complete control of the country he had to overcome the biggest and toughest obstacles, the castles. Each castle was garrisoned to deal with local rebellions, equipped and supplied to withstand lengthy sieges. Owain’s men used a variety of ingenious methods to gain control of the castles. At Conwy, the Tudors had used a trick. At Dynefor they ‘sounded out’ the garrison by shouting out all the gruesome things they would inflict on the English if they did not surrender. At Caerphilly they formed a human pyramid to jump over the walls and open the gates. By the middle of 1403 Glyn Dwr had captured most of the castles and was in control of the country. Gwyn Williams (1985) distilled the essence of the war in Wales in the following graphic terms:

The twelve-year war of independence was, for the English, largely a matter of relieving their isolated castles. Expedition after expedition was beaten bootless back. Henry IV, beset by Welsh, Scots, French and rebellious barons, sent in army after army, some of them huge, all of them futile; he never really got to grips with it and the revolt largely wore itself out, in a small country blasted, burned and exhausted beyond the limit of endurance. For the Welsh, it was a Marcher rebellion and a peasants’ revolt which grew into a national guerilla war , its leader apparently flitting so swiftly and mysteriously from one storm centre to the next that in English eyes he grew to be an ogre credited with occult powers, a name to frighten children with. This probably reflects the operation of widely scattered guerilla bands operating in his name.

The sheer tenacity of the war of independence was startling. Few revolts in contemporary Europe lasted more than a few months and no previous Welsh uprising had lasted as long. This one raged for more than a full decade and didn’t really end for fifteen. While guerilla bands lurked and fought throughout the length and breadth of the country, Owain was able to put armies of ten thousand men into the field. Adam of Usk credited him with an irregular force of thirty thousand at the peak of the war. They maintained themselves partly by sheer pillage, while Owain used a combination of fire, sword and blackmail, with whole districts as well as rich men being held to ransom. For their part, the royal armies exacted a terrible vengeance in wholesale arson, looting and confiscations, even as retreating rebels scorched their own earth. Many a town and village was trapped in the grim grip of terror and counter-terror. In February 1404 the people in the hill country above Brecon agreed to submit to the king if he could defeat the rebels in their area; if not, they would remain loyal to Owain. In effect, as well as cause, this was a state of civil war. Most of the English in Wales were viewed as enemies, especially in the towns. Thomas Dyer of Carmarthen lost a thousand pounds in the rebellion. Many Welsh families had split allegiances. Robert, Abbot of Bardsey, declared for Glyn Dwr; his brother, Evan, was killed defending Caernarfon Castle for the king. Even in Owain’s own family, his cousin Hywel tried to murder him.

Yet the English campaigns of 1400 to 1403 were unable to exploit these divisions and did little to dent Owain’s military and diplomatic successes. For this was more than mere rebellion. It had serious international dimensions. During 1402-3 the revolt became enmeshed in baronial conspiracies in England which were to rally the powerful northern Percies against Henry and to cost Archbishop Scrope of York his life. The Civil War had spread to the North of England.

A Walesi Bárdok: The Bards of Wales

One of the best-known literary connections between Britain and Hungary comes in the shape of an epic ballad written in the mid-nineteenth century by the poet János Arany, who was a contemporary of Sándor Petőfi, the national poet of Hungary, who was killed in the Hungarian War of Independence of 1848-49. Arany was, indeed, a close friend of Petőfi, and his death in exile in Russia had a profound effect on Arany, as did the entire events of 1848-49. He later wrote a parabolic poem, Walesi Bárdok, about the Plantagenet King Edward’s crushing of Welsh Independence and his legendary mass murder of the country’s bards. It’s publication coincided with the visit of the Hapsburg Emperor Franz Joseph to Hungary, at a time when there was a sense of Austrian oppression among many Hungarians, and suppression of dissent. It was not safe for poets to write openly of their hatred of the Empire, so Arany used his knowledge of British history and literature to compose a masterly yet thinly-veiled attack on the Hapsburg monarchy, leaving his Hungarian readers in little doubt as to whom his scorn was directed.

Appropriately, János Arany was born on the day after St David’s Day, the festival of the patron saint of Wales, on 2 March, 1817, in Nagyszalonta, Bihár County, then in Royal Hungary, but now part of Romania. He was the youngest of ten children, only two of whom lived beyond childhood. At the time of his birth, his older sister Sára was already married and his parents, György Arany and Sára Megyeri, were 60 and 44 years old, respectively. János Arany learned to read and write early on, and was reported to read anything he could find, both in Hungarian and in Latin. Since his parents needed support early in Arany’s life, he began working at the age of 14 as an associate teacher.

From 1833 he attended the Reformed Church College of Debrecen where he studied German and French, though he quickly became tired of scholarly life, and temporarily joined an acting troupe. Later on, he worked in Nagyszalonta, Debrecen, and Budapest as teacher, newspaper editor, and in various clerical positions.

In 1840 he married Julianna Ercsey (1816–1885). They had two children, Julianna, whose early death by pneumonia devastated the poet, and Lászlo who also became a poet and a collector of Hungarian folklore..

In 1845, he won the competition of the Kisfaludy Társaság (a literary society) with his writing, “Az elveszett alkotmány” (“The lost constitution” in English).

After Toldi, one of his most famous works, was published, he and Sándor Petőfi became close friends (see their letters: To János Arany by Petőfi and Reply to Petőfi by Arany). Petőfi’s death in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848-9 had a great impact on him.

He was employed as a teacher in Nagykőrös where the local museum is named after him.

Arany was elected a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1858. He was the secretary-general of the Academy from 1865. Also, he was elected director of the Kisfaludy Society, the greatest literary association of Hungary.

The early death of his daughter, Julianna in 1865 marked the beginning of Arany’s hiatus as a poet. He did not write any original pieces until the summer of 1877, when he began working on his poetic cycle entitled Őszikék. Őszikék is substantially different from the previous works of Arany, concerning themes like elderliness, or the imminence of death.

He translated three dramas of Shakespeare into Hungarian, and they are considered to be some of the greatest translations into Hungarian in history; he also helped other Hungarian translators with his comments. He revealed a great preference for the spiritual world and poetry of Britain. The stimulating effect of translating Shakespeare roused a vivid echo in Arány, and he succeeded in transplanting the dramas of the bard into a Hungarian worthy of him.

The epic poetry of János Arany presents the legendary and historical past of his nation. The Death of King Buda (1864), the first part of a projected Hun trilogy is one of the best narrative poems in Hungarian literature. The other parts of the trilogy (Ildikó, and Prince Csaba) are unfinished. Arany died in Budapest on October 22, 1882.

One of his most famous poems is A Walesi Bárdok’ (The Bards of Wales). Arany wrote this poem when the Austrian Emperor, Franz Joseph I, visited Hungary for the first time after the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution. Originally Arany was asked to write a poem to praise the Emperor but he wrote a piece concerning the campaigns of the Plantagenet King of England, Edward I, to subjugate the Welsh and trample over their culture. Arany was drawing a parallel here with Austria’s treatment of Hungary and the Hungarians.

János Arany is today considered as one of the greatest Hungarian poets beside Sándor Petőfi, Endre Ady, Miklós Radnoti and József Attila . His poems are among the most widely read works in Hungary, and children are required to memorise and recite A Walesi Bardok as part of the National Curriculum.

Here are some extracts, in a translation by Peter Zollman (1997), from The Bards of Wales (1857):

King Edward scales the hills of Wales

Upon his stallion.

“Hear my decree! I want to see,

My new dominion.

“Show me the yield of every field,

The grain, the grass, the wood!

Is all the land now moist and rich

With red rebellious blood?

And are the Welsh, the wretched Welsh,

A peaceful, happy folk?

I want them pleased, just like the beast

They harness in the yoke.”

“Sire, this jewel in the crown,

Your Wales is fair and good:

Rich is the yield of every

The grassland and the wood.

“And Sire, the Welsh, God’s gift, the Welsh,

So pleased they all behave!

Dark every hut, fearfully shut

And silent as the grave.”

King Edward scales the hills of Wales

Upon his stallion.

And where he rides dead silence hides

In his dominion.

He comes to high Montgomery

To banquet and to rest;

It falls on Lord Montgomery

To entertain the guest:

“Well then, you sirs, you filthy curs,

Who will now toast the king?

I want a bard to praise my deeds,

A bard of Wales to sing!”

They look askance with a furtive glance,

The noblemen of Wales,

Their cheeks turn white in deadly fright,

As crimson anger pales.

Deep silence falls upon the halls,

And lo, before their eyes,

They see an old man, white as snow,

An ancient bard to rise.

“I shall recite your glorious deeds

Just as you bid me, Sire,”

And death rattles in grim battles

As he touches the lyre.

“Our dead are plenty as the corn

When harvest is begun,

And as we reap and glean, we weep:

You did this, guilty one!”

“Off to the stake!” The King commands,

“This was churlishly hard.

Sing us, you there, a softer air,

You, young and courtly bard!”

“Maiden, don’t bear a slave! Mother,

Your babe must not be nursed!…”

A royal nod. He reached the stake

Together with the first.

But boldly and without a call

A third one takes the floor;

Without salute he strikes the lute,

His song begins to soar:

“The brave were killed, just as you willed,

Or languish in your gaols:

To hail your name or sing your fame

You’ll find no bard in Wales.

“He may be gone, but his songs live on –

The toast is: King beware!

You bear the curse and even worse

Of Welsh bards everywhere.”

“I’ll see to that! – Thunders the king –

You spiteful Welsh peasants!

The stake will toast you, every bard,

Who spurns my ordinance!”

Five hundred went singing to die,

Five hundred in the blaze,

But none would sing to cheer the king,

The loyal toast to raise. –

But over drums and piercing fifes,

Beyond the soldiers’ hails,

They swell the song, five hundred strong,

Those martyred bards of Wales.

Sources:

George Szirtes et. al. (eds.) (1997), The Lost Rider: A bilingual anthology: The Corvina Book of Hungarian Verse. Budapest: Corvina.

Like this:

Leighton Andrews, former AM, member of the National Assembly for Wales. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The former Education Minister in the Welsh Assembly, Leighton Andrews (left), my fellow student-leader from 1975-1980, has recently published a writ which was served on ‘persons unknown’ occupying the Maths Tower of the then University College of North Wales, Bangor, in November 1976. Although I was personally ‘in occupation’ throughout the four or five nights and days from 25th November, this is the first time, on Leighton’s website, that I’ve had the chance to read this document properly, since it was served to the iron fire escape near the top of the tower on a typically blustery day, and was almost immediately blown off as the College authorities, including the Assistant Registrar, descended.

The last I saw of it was with him in hot pursuit, and I had no idea that it had been retrieved until recently, when Leighton produced it for a talk at the National Eisteddfod. Perhaps it was retrieved and reposted, or delivered to the Student Union building nearby, but no-one inside the occupation accepted it by hand, as to do so, we were all briefed, would be to accept its terms and leave us open to identification and prosecution if we didn’t vacate immediately. We were there because the College had already expelled four officers of the Cymric Society named on its membership card. As long as we remained ‘persons unknown’, they advised us, it would be difficult to enforce the writ, except through forced entry and repossession. We therefore ignored it and there was no contact, physical or otherwise with those serving the writ, or with the document itself.

I have kept a diary from that year and papers from the following two years (speeches and statements). As a historian myself, I think it’s high time I keep my promise and publish what I can recall from these sources and my memory of these events, from a much ‘safer’ distance in time and space. Like Leighton, I was a student at UCNW from 1975-78, moving south to Cardiff to pursue my research interests in the coalfield valleys thereafter, while Leighton stayed on as a sabbatical officer and then researcher in Bangor.

Although having no Welsh family connections myself, I had grown up among Welsh miners and teachers in Coventry and Birmingham, many of whom attended my father’s Baptist Chapel and were often ‘surrogate’ parents to me and my siblings as part of its broad community. Indeed, the presence of the Welsh in these cities was so strong in the sixties and seventies, that my pastor-father organised what were called ‘eisteddfodau’ for the chapels in the West Midlands, and in which I competed ( in English, of course). It therefore seemed a natural choice to study History and Biblical Studies at Bangor, and I immediately felt at home among the Welsh Nonconformists, both Welsh and English-speaking. I quickly came into contact with a wide variety of them through my involvement in the Christian Union, many of them theological students living in ‘Bala-Bangor’, their college in Upper Bangor. Some spoke very little English in their everyday lives. Others were from south Wales and, like me, attended Penrallt English Baptist Church, where Rev Roy Jenkins, now a regular contributor to Thought for Today on BBC Radio Four, was then the young pastor.

I also understood the history of the Nonconformists in the Liberal and Labour politics of Britain since, in an ideological sense, my father did indeed know Lloyd George! So it was not by accident that Leighton and I got to know each other through membership of the Young Liberals, then led by Peter Hain, in our first year, becoming active in the students’ union, he as a Council member and I, in my second term, as Undergraduate Representative for the Arts Faculty. Before arriving in Bangor, I had made contact with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Christian Pacifist organisation, and in the late summer of 1976 became closely involved with Welsh Baptist Pacifists and Quakers, helping to establish the Welsh section of the F.o.R. that autumn, following a week-long Conference on Devolution, Nationalism and Pacifism in Iona, with delegates from Scotland and other parts of Wales. My diary also shows that I attended anti-Fascist meetings in Birmingham and was increasingly involved in non-violent direct action campaigns, inspired by the writings of Gandhi, Martin Luther-King jnr. and John Ferguson. It was in this spirit that, on returning for my second year in Bangor, I resolved to learn both the Welsh language and, at the same time, more about the culture and politics associated with it. After some weeks spent in a village on Anglesey, I moved into Neuadd John Morris-Jones, the Welsh-speaking Hall of Residence in Upper Bangor in October, and quickly developed a network of friends among the Welsh learners and student-teachers there, many of whom hailed from south and west Wales. At the same time, I became acutely aware of the linguistic and cultural ‘apartheid’ which existed between English and Welsh-speaking students in Bangor, the latter making up only 10% of the student population in a town which was 60% bilingual and a surrounding area which was up to 90% first-language Welsh. I could also detect that there were deep divisions between those from this ‘Fro Cymraeg’ (Welsh-speaking heartland) and Welsh-speakers from other parts of Wales, who, though speaking the language from birth, were often not literate enough to study in it as a medium, unless they had attended bilingual schools in these areas. ‘Cymraeg Byw’ (Living Welsh) was their Welsh, and this is what I learnt, in the main.

Seven years later, although fairly fluent, I had to find my first post in England, since I, too, was not literate enough to use it as a medium of education. These were often referred to, somewhat condescendingly, as ‘Myfyrwyr Cymreig’, Welsh in culture but not in academic language, being slightly above the lower tier of ‘Cymru-di-Cymraeg’, the anglicised and monoglot English-speakers. It was largely from these ‘second and third class’ Welsh-speakers that the teachers of ‘Cymraeg Byw’ were drawn, many of them having learnt it themselves. Naturally, this group of committed Welsh Learners and Language Activists, although committed to direct action in defacing property, mostly English-only official signs, were also keen, through the students’ union, to teach the language to anyone, for any purpose, and were therefore more willing to elicit a more sympathetic view of Welsh culture among the English and international student population. Elen Rhys-Tyler was typical of this group, and was the Chair, or ‘Cadeirydd’ of the Welsh Learners’ Society.

It was also about this time that I first met Ann Beynon, a first-language Welsh-speaker, who had been the Student Union President in 1974-75, the year before I arrived in Bangor. By the time I met her, she was a postgraduate student in the Department of Welsh Language and Literature. She told me that two years earlier, in November 1973, students in both Aberystwyth and Bangor had gone on strike over the seemingly uncontrolled expansion of both University Colleges. In spite of this, and the Student Union’s opposition to its plans, the Bangor College planned to grow to 3,500 places by 1980/81, to include 150 places resulting from the amalgamation with the teacher-training college, St. Mary’s, on the opposite hillside of the town, representing an increase of at least 10%. Most of these new students were to be added in departments which traditionally drew their intake from ‘over the border’ and further afield, thus adding to the anglicising influence of the College on the town and surrounding area. This was exacerbated by the College authorities’ continuing refusal to implement a full bilingual policy for documents and signs throughout its administration and buildings, a policy which had already fully implemented by the Student Union under Anne Beynon’s leadership. The parallel campaign for Welsh language rights had already led to the setting up of an autonomous union of Welsh-speaking students in Aberystwyth, within an ‘Urdd’ or ‘Guild’ of students.

Percentages of Welsh speakers in the principal areas of Wales. Based on the GFDL Image:WalesNumbered.png. (Notice that no principal area falls within the 37,5-50% range!) Based on 2001 census data. QuartierLatin1968 02:30, 6 September 2005 (UTC) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By the autumn of 1976, however, the Welsh-speaking students in Bangor had become alienated by the College’s intransigence over the bilingual policy and through the growth of a hard-line element of nationalists in a group called ‘Adfer’ (‘Reinstate’) which had broken away from the Welsh Nationalist Party’s support for an independent, bilingual Wales, and were advocating language and immigration controls for Gwynedd (the three ‘shires’ of Caernarfon, Anglesey & Merioneth). This group, led mainly by Theology students from ‘Bala-Bangor’, were becoming increasingly influential in the ‘Cymric Society’, which although operating with a grant from the Student Union, was becoming increasingly separated in practice, based on the Welsh Halls of Residence.

Following an initial declaration of intent, the Society launched a campaign of direct action against the College, without reference to the Student Union, and despite the urging of restraint and patience by members of the Welsh Learners’ Society.

In a coordinated night-time action, slogans were daubed throughout the College’s buildings, including a large slogan proclaiming ‘Justice for the Language’ on the long wall of the main upper college, overlooking the town. Monolingual English signs and notices were torn down. The following day the College authorities met in a secret, emergency session, and immediately expelled the four members of the Cymric Society named on its membership card, including its minute’s secretary and entertainment secretary, the latter of whom had had no involvement or prior knowledge of the action. The injustice of this victimisation was obvious, and the Student Union’s bilingual solicitor in Menai Bridge was immediately called into action to write to the Principal, Sir Charles Evans, following a lengthy briefing with the four students. I remember well the sombre mood which attended that meeting in his office, even though I could understand only a little of the content of the discussion. However, the predicted backlash in the student body as a whole to the precipitate action, meant that, when the General Meeting was held on 18th November, there was an understandable mood of antagonism against the Cymric which defeated a motion calling for concerted action to secure the reinstatement of the four officers.

The Society again took matters into their own hands by announcing a strike, which was swiftly followed by an occupation of the main lecture theatre. There seemed little alternative for the Welsh learners but to support this unofficial action, and I well remember the defiantly spontaneous, harmonised singing of Welsh hymns by the whole of the Cymric gathered there. For someone brought up in a Nonconformist household and church, this was a very moving experience, evoking a deep sense both of shared values and of the injury and injustice over the treatment of the language which these students felt so keenly, but were enduring so stoically and endeavouring to overcome.

When a second motion proposing direct action against the College by the whole student body was narrowly defeated a week later, with only a small number of Welsh ‘delegates’ present and refusing to vote, the substantial minority of English-speaking students who had supported it decamped to Neuadd John Morris-Jones, where an impromptu meeting was held in its main hall, declaring its support for the Cymric and the setting up of an autonomous, ‘sister’ Welsh-speaking Union such as existed at Aberystwyth. Only then, we agreed, could the Welsh-speakers have the official voice necessary to deliver the bilingual policy without further victimisation from the College authorities and having their protests continually voted down by an English student majority with little sympathy for their cause. Speaking in response, the provisional Cymric leadership called upon the Welsh learners and their supporters to show their support by occupying the Maths Tower. A set of keys was produced and a small, advanced party gained unforced entry, followed by larger numbers, so that control was swiftly established. After a small group of cleaners were allowed access in the early morning, the stairwell was well-barricaded, and the Tower remained closed for lectures the next day and into the next week, despite the writ being granted.

The permanent occupiers were led by Elen Rhys-Tyler, while Vaughan Roderick, Leighton Andrews and myself acted as go-betweens for the Welsh learners, the Cymric and the Student Union. A further Student Union Emergency General Meeting was called for the middle of the following week, as the term was coming rapidly to an end, there was a need to ensure that any threat of action would not be seen as idle and could result in the reinstatement of the four students for the beginning of the next term (I had joined the student strike as Undergraduate Representative, since my main concern was for the academic progress of the four).

We left the tower reluctantly, but of our own free will, a day or so after the writ was issued. This was at the request of the Cymric, who had also begun the unofficial supportive action through the Welsh Learners’ Society. We had been invited to take action as its members, not as officials and members of the Student Union, since the Union had rejected such action. We therefore had no mandate for the action on behalf of the student body as a whole. The Cymric Society also ended the occupation because of a small, but disruptive, group of ultra-left activists in the occupation, who had no real interest in the campaign for a bilingual policy and were advocating a more violent campaign solely on the issue of College victimisation. In reality, we feared that they simply wanted to foment disorder and destruction of property. Since ‘the Cymric’ were committed, in the long-standing tradition of the Welsh Language Society, to pacifism and non-violent direct action, they considered that this was too much of a risk to take both with the College’s property and with the future of a campaign that was already in its fourth year and set to run for some time. As Welsh learners, we also felt responsible for the backlash the action had already provoked among both students and staff, as well as for the tutorial work we had abandoned. In addition, we needed time to win support from the wider community in Bangor and the surrounding villages, since the College, as a major employer, was already manipulating the media to claim that important employee and student records had been trashed in the original actions taken by the Cymric Society a fortnight earlier. We therefore agreed to resume both our academic studies and constitutional/ diplomatic campaigning activities through the Student Union. In this, we gained the support for a second Emergency General Meeting from its officers, especially its Deputy-President and Leighton Andrews, to be held in Neuadd Pritchard-Jones later that week.

The Welsh learners withdrew from the Maths Tower following the release of hundreds of balloons declaring ongoing support for ‘the Four’ and the bilingual policy all across the town, put bilingual flyers under every door in every Hall of Residence, so that Neuadd Pritchard-Jones, the main Assembly Hall in the old ‘Top’ College, was filled to its 2,000 capacity, despite the non-attendance of all but a handful of Cymric members, since their occupation was continuing in the lecture theatre nearby. A simple but vaguely worded motion calling for ‘all peaceful actions’ to reinstate the four expelled students was proposed by the Union’s Palestinian Deputy-President, Mohammed Abu Koash. It was supported, with reservations clearly aired, by an overwhelming majority of those present, which meant that, had the votes of the otherwise ‘occupied’ Cymric been taken into account, two-thirds of the College’s students were unmistakably behind some form of concerted and coordinated non-violent direct action. A few days later, on receipt of written assurances of ‘good behaviour’ from the four, the College backed down, commuting their punishment to a suspension until after the Christmas holidays. All four stood together in accepting responsibility, including two brothers who were talented musicians and members of a soon-to-be internationally acclaimed Welsh folk group. Everyone in the College, except (it seemed) Sir Charles Evans, knew or accepted that at least one of them had taken no part in the action which led to their expulsion, but this brother, to his lasting credit, had steadfastly refused to deny responsibility while the other brother and the two other students stood likewise accused. Many lecturers, regardless of their views on the language issues, had been deeply concerned both for these obviously talented students and for the precedent that their continued expulsion would set.

The College gradually implemented a bilingual policy over the next two years, and the focus of campaigning shifted to the linguistic and cultural effects of its continued expansion. Although the Welsh learners urged the Cymric to work in tandem with the Student Union to achieve this, its leadership was heavily influenced by the separatist ‘Adfer’ group into setting up a ‘culturally pure’ Welsh Student Union, ‘Undeb Myfyrwyr Colegau Bangor’, operating out of its ‘Caffi Deiniol’ in Upper Bangor, and drawing membership from the Bala-Bangor Theological College and the Teacher-training college, Coleg y Normal. They rejected the overtures for a con-federal union structure, similar to the Guild of Students in Aberystwyth, with autonomy on Welsh language issues and campaigns and sole use of the third floor of the Student Union building, together with the Welsh Learners’ Society. Jim Bloice-Smith, a prominent English ‘home counties’ student member of the Christian Union, an independent College society, offered to chair negotiations, but even this approach from a respected member of the overall student community was dismissed, albeit politely. There followed a variety of rather sinister attempts to spy on and ‘purge’ members of the Welsh Learners’ Society in ‘Neuadd JMJ’.

The Society continued to operate within the official Student Union and was instrumental in persuading it to make the offer of a new constitution to the break-away union, a ‘covenant’ which was written simultaneously in Welsh and English, reflecting the different cultures as well as languages which would need to agree to develop a genuinely bilingual student body, rather than one which simply provided token translations. However, it became increasingly apparent that UMCB was set on a course of linguistic apartheid. In response to continued threats and intimidation, including the use of ‘kangaroo courts’, the Welsh learners within the Plaid Cymru student branch came out ‘fighting’, finding a platform for their moderate stance and almost succeeding in getting a full ‘slate’ elected to its executive in the spring of 1977. This was evidence that the ultra-nationalist position of UMCB was not as widely supported among the ordinary Welsh-speaking students of Neuadd John Morris-Jones as it claimed, even those from the Welsh ‘heartlands’ of Gwynedd. The Welsh learners also became active in UCMC (NUS Wales), which had been established some four or five years earlier, and elected Michael Antoniw, a Cardiff Law student of Ukrainian descent, as its Chairman, at a Conference held in Bangor that Easter. It established a ‘Welsh Language Action Group’, coordinating activity across the constituent colleges of the University and the teacher-training colleges. UCMC also provided a forum for research about the wider educational context of Welsh-medium education throughout Wales.

However, the opportunities for democratic debate and discussion in Welsh in Bangor were effectively stifled by the leadership of the UMCB, and the increasingly oppressive atmosphere which the Warden of ‘JMJ’ Hall strove to ameliorate led to the leadership of the Welsh Learners’ Society decamping to set up their own private residence in Upper Bangor. This proved something of a thorn in the side of the ‘Adferites’ who targeted the house for attack on at least one occasion that I can remember well.

It was during this, my final year, in Bangor, that I wrote the following speech as a Student representative on the College Court of Governors’ meeting on 1st February 1978, on the proposals put forward for the College’s future. The Court was split three ways on this. The College hierarchy wanted to continue the policy of expansion by at least 10%, while UMCB, through its sympathising lecturers, wanted a cut in student numbers by more than 15%. The Student Union’s position remained one of opposition to both cuts and further expansion:

In opposition to the motion (supporting a cut in student numbers), the Students’ Union…would not wish to deny that the imbalance of student numbers in favour of those from outside of Wales has had an anglicising effect on the College and local communities. However, we disagree with the supposed ‘solution’ put forward by the breakaway union….and supported here by Mr Griffith and Mr Orwig, for two main reasons:

1.) As we’ve said in our own motion, cutting the intake of students to 500 undergraduates would inevitably mean that many local people, many of them Welsh-speaking, will lose their jobs. About two thousand people are directly employed by the College. That is the reality which the proposers of this motion have to face. Since there is little alternative means of employment in and around Bangor, these people will be forced to move elsewhere to look for work. One of the reasons why the Welsh language is in such a weak position is…because Welsh-speakers have continually been forced out of the Welsh-speaking areas in order to find security and a decent standard of living…What this proposal does is to look at the language question in splendid isolation from the social and economic conditions in which the language exists. It looks at it from the lofty position of an intellectual élite who refuse to descend from their pedestal to ask the ordinary people in the College, the ‘werin’, what they want. The Students’ Union, however, holds regular meetings with representatives of the campus trade unions and we know what their attitudes are to this sort of policy. Mr Griffiths and Mr Orwig agree with the leaders of the ‘Undeb Cymraeg’ , who recently stated on TV that they believe that it is only this intellectual élite of university students and other literary figures which can save the Welsh language.

2.) Cutting the student intake to 500 will not make the College any more relevant to the local community. It will probably result in the closure of the College in the same way that Lampeter is threatened with closure.

Our motion restates Student Union policy going back over a period of five years…We’ve decided to bring this issue up again at this Court meeting not so much as a response to the ‘Undeb Cymraeg Education Policy’ (we didn’t know that Mr Griffith and Mr Orwig had agreed to act as their mouthpieces until we received the papers from the Registrar two weeks ago) but because, despite the consistent opposition shown by the students and local people, the College has continued to expand. Although the expansion rate has slowed, the College is still proposing to increase to nearly 3,500 by 1980/81. Only 150 of these new places result from the amalgamation with St Mary’s (Teacher-training College). The Principal himself admits that ‘even modest growth of the College presents us with problems’. In our view, this is something of an understatement, because it seems to fail to recognise that we have enormous problems already. Why is expansion not in the interests of staff and students?

1.) It would increase the sizes of already overcrowded classes;

2.) It would produce an added strain upon staff and essential resources, e.g. the Library, because the College will attempt to keep further employment to an absolute minimum.

We are opposed to any further expansion, but I must emphasise that we do not see stopping expansion as an end in itself. We want to freeze the number of students coming to Bangor so that then, as lecturers and students and local people, we can attempt to change the College into a more progressive institution more oriented towards the needs of the local community. ‘Undeb Cenedlaethol Myfyrwyr Cymru’ (NUS Wales), has been at the forefront of the campaign to obtain a more comprehensive system of further education in Wales and, as a step towards this, the devolution of the University of Wales to the Welsh Assembly. The only way, ultimately, to make the Colleges of Wales more Welsh is to encourage Welsh students to stay in Wales for their higher education, and that is why we advocate the setting up of a federated Coleg Cymraeg to coordinate teaching through the medium of Welsh throughout the University, and, ultimately, on a comprehensive basis, throughout Wales. Our policy of ‘no expansion’ is thus a means to these ends, the destruction of a binary system and of University elitism and an end to an education system dependent on ‘paper qualifications’. We must ensure that access to a decent standard of education is open to all who wish to benefit from it.

We agree that the College is at present far too large, but the way to counter this is not to cut its size…but to broaden its functions and change its nature, into a College whose prime commitment is to meet the needs of the local community. That doesn’t mean that we want a College which is parochial and inward-looking which is what you’d get if you replaced a College full of English academic students like me with a College full of Welsh academic students. However, in the short-term we can prevent the College from losing altogether its Welsh character by adopting a realistic policy of ‘no further expansion’, while rejecting the recipe for disaster which (some) would have us follow. However, by doing so, we will only be carrying out a cosmetic operation. The place of the Welsh language in higher and further education in Wales can only be found in terms of a more comprehensive system. That is why we ask you to reject motion 13, because it fails to identify the real problem. It fails to see the need for a more fundamental reorganisation in the structure of education in Wales. It also proposes to seriously damage any progressive movements by throwing out of work the very people whose support we need. I ask you to accept motion 14 as a policy around which we can unite and carry the campaign for the Welsh language forward.

The motion calling for the cut in undergraduate intake was defeated, but just over a week later, on February 9th, a group of 50-70 members of UMCB, the breakaway ‘Undeb Cymraeg’, occupied various parts of the old building in ‘Top College’. Their action was taken in protest against the then democratic decision of the College Court not to recognise the new union and to refuse the policy of limiting the number of non-Welsh-speaking students coming to the College for the next session. The campaign began on 6th February with the jamming of keyholes in Top College by means of glue. The following morning the UMCB members barricaded themselves in the Principal’s office and the Registrar’s office. When the barricades were breached they then moved into the nearby hall, Neuadd Powys. However, realising that their occupation was having little effect, they decided to end it by the early afternoon. Although it was thought that this was the preliminary action in a long campaign against the College authorities, it was also noted that the ‘Cymric’ campaign of 1976 had ‘received the support of many non-Welsh-speaking students and staff for its aim of an equitable language policy’, support which was ‘not forthcoming for this new campaign’.

Later that Spring, the Welsh Learners’ Society helped to get Barry Owen, a mature student from Flintshire, elected as the Students’ Union’s new President, the first Welsh-speaker to occupy the role since Ann Beynon. Leighton Andrews also became a sabbatical officer. I was elected Vice-Chairman for the University Sector of UCMC, succeeding Mick Antoniw as Chairman in 1979, shortly after the Devolution debacle and the success of the Federation of Conservative Students in taking control of the Student Union in Bangor and the Guild of Students in Aberystwyth, prior to Mrs Thatcher’s election. UCMC succeeded in continuing to offer a platform for progressive nationalists and Welsh language activists. Most importantly, it managed to contain the widening cracks on university expansion, bilingualism and Welsh-medium education in Bangor from spreading along a fault-line to Aberystwyth and Carmarthen. Our voice was respectfully heard on this, in Welsh, at a debate at the National Eisteddfod in Caernarfon in August 1979.

An accompanying major policy gain was the establishment of a federal Welsh-medium teaching board to develop courses throughout the constituent colleges of the University. In the autumn of 1979, UCMC also published its manifesto, Addysg yng Ngymru (Education in Wales) which elicited an editorial in The Western Mail and a great deal of more positive support from academics and administrators alike in the Welsh education system. The debate on Welsh-medium education had moved on from being simply the preserve of an intellectual elite to its central role in developing a more comprehensive system of further and higher education throughout Wales, across the binary divide. Unfortunately, until the Welsh Assembly was finally established, this policy could not be implemented outside the somewhat narrow confines of the marble halls of increasingly competitive university colleges and through the Welsh Joint Education Council (WJEC). Successive Tory and Labour governments at ‘St Stephen’s’, Westminster, simply allowed further, unbridled expansion of the university sector and the transformation of respected local specialist Colleges of Higher Education into universities, without examining the relevance of the courses offered to local needs. Leighton Andrews has written about this legacy elsewhere.